Keith: I started having some health issues and not even knowing it. So I was having issues with anxiety attacks, losing weight and memory loss, a lot of problems. And so long story short, it started about sixth grade. And until about age 17, I was going downhill really, really hard. And my parents tried to take me to may different types of specialists. Couldn’t get an answer. I was sleeping 18 hours a day. I was about 126 pounds, had a joint pain muscle spasms. And my mom was doing a Google search back in about 2002. And came across Lyme disease. So we got a Western blot test that came up positive.
And she told me that that’s what it was. And I was so happy, my friend with me at the time was confused, like, why the heck are you happy that you have a disease?
I said, I have an answer that I’m not that much of a screw up. Because I was struggling so hard with myself fighting against myself.
At that point. I literally attended a semester of high school, in terms of credits. I got a GED, but that was it.
Josh: So finding out you had Lyme disease was almost like this answer to prayer.
Keith: And so then quickly I realized that I needed to change my life around, which meant to stop living an unhealthy life. So I’m smoking two packs a day of cigarettes, smoking weed all the time, drinking… And so I was starting my treatment for Lyme disease and my parents are spending thousands of dollars a month for treatment. And here I am smoking cigarettes.
So I realized there was a disconnect and I wasn’t being truthful. And the last thing I wanted to be was 30 years old, I’m 33 years old now, and still be sick and have an excuse and say it’s Lyme disease.
I did everything I could to own the situation and take control of it. And then that led me to boxing.
So my father is professional boxing coach. He’s also a PhD in neuroscience. He’s a clinical psychologist. And so I went into that and initially my goal with boxing was I would want to build up some base with boxing and then go into MMA. Cause that was really big at that time.
And so I continued to train and attempt to box while going through Lyme treatment for years. And during that time learned a lot about boxing and literally did nothing else, but boxing train and learn.
Josh: You made a decision to change this, to pay the price. Like man, I’m willing to get rid of the people I’m hanging out with. I’m gonna get rid of these habits. You start boxing, and again, you’re still fighting this disease as you’re boxing.
Keith: My boxing ended in 2010. I got a neck injury, actually self-inflicted it by accident, trying to strengthen my neck up and managed to pull it out of alignment. And I found out later on massive bone spurring in my neck from getting hit and maybe calcification from Lyme disease.
And I thought my life was taken away because at that point I literally had had no girlfriend, was living with my parents in Mexico, basically in a cabin. They were living in a house. I had nothing. I had no schooling, no college, no friends.
And it was all over. It was all over. So crying for a couple of days, couple of weeks. And then the pain and issues that happened for a short time with the neck injury. My father told me I should start coaching. And initially I said, no, I don’t want to do that. That’s horrible.
Anyway, I came back up to United States and started working with a real small Podunk MMA club. And it was literally blood on the wall and blood on the ring. It was just a crap hole. I went in there with all these guys and help them get their striking better with their hands. And about that time is when I met my wife.
My wife was in Alpharetta during all this time and she was actually managing a gym called KBX for about five or six years, also fighting for them. And uh, I met her on match.com.
So it’s 2011 and meeting her introduced me to that, okay, I can make this more than a hole in the wall thing.
I was mentoring under my father and I literally learned everything that he learned. I studied intensely under him for years. And so I was just like a duplicate of him at that point. Which is what we have to do. We have to learn completely from somebody, kind of model them. Then we have to learn how to be our own thing.
My wife introduced me to that new thing.
Chad: You didn’t start as business partners in this gym. Did you focus on how much money it’s going to make, how much this is going to cost to start? Or are there any obstacles in your way or anything that you had to overcome or was it, this is what I’m doing. It’s all on the line. I’m going through the motions. What was your mentality at that point?
I assume you hadn’t read any business books.
Keith: With business it’s a balance between service and profit, right? And if you only make profits it’s a scam and if you only give services it’s a charity. You got to find that middle ground. Fortunately I’ve always leaned on the side of service and which is a side that I think everyone would rather lean on. Cause you can always pull yourself over.
Chad: Pause for a second here. The gym is profitable. Things are going well, your plan is working. You’re supporting yourself. What was your fuel to grow bigger?
What was, what was your entrepreneurial fuel at that point to want to do more?
Keith: So the two dreams we were running towards was this larger facility, and a larger clientele base. At that time the goal was to hit 200 or 300.
When we moved to Baxter Street in 2015, that’s when I really knew that I had to take ownership of the situation and I started getting into the personal growth stuff.
I was introduced to the idea of goal setting. My dad exposed me to Napoleon Hill when I was in Mexico, I was memorizing Think and Grow Rich. I literally recorded myself reading the whole book and I memorized a couple of those mantras that are in there.
But it kind of killed it for me when the boxing didn’t work out. So I kind of had to find my own kind of people or philosophy that’s associated with that to get back on track.
So Brian Tracy was big in that. Obviously Tony Robbins, always people like that, Jim Rohn. I went from doubling my own personal income in a year. So, you know, I went from like 20,000 to 40,000 in one year.
And so at age, like 26 or so with no high school education or anything else, really besides self-education here, I got to double my income in one year. And I got into my mind the goal to step out of the day-to-day business.
Chad: You are the technician, you are the knowledge base. You are everything, you are the business, your name is on the business.
Keith: And so that’s the thing, I guess the message for people that are getting into business or have a business, is that even if that’s true at that time, it doesn’t have to stay true.
Josh: So let’s hone in on this a little bit. Here you are, you start your own business. You’ve worked in the field. So you know your craft, you know what you’re teaching, you know everything as far as the training, not the business, but the training. So you know the product.
But you don’t know the business yet. So here’s, what’s kind of funny. I have an insurance background and when people are starting a business, they got to get insurance. And one of the questions the insurance agent will ask the companies want to know is Keith, how much money are you going to make your first year?
You don’t know, like once you start rolling and building the business, you start acquiring knowledge.
Keith: I remember it would be hard to sell a year membership. And now we sell year memberships all the time. But I remember just being like so scared to ask somebody to commit for a year, even though I was ready to be there for a year for them.
Josh: And now it’s no problem, ‘cause you build up the stamina, the speed, the strength to handle it. So you’re going from being this one man wrecking crew, building a business, serving clients to now having to figure out, Oh okay, I know the product, I got the values. I know what we want to offer here. I got to build some systems. I’ve gotta be able to train other people precisely how to do what I do.
And I am guessing from your focus and your personality, you’re a bit of a perfectionist. So letting somebody else take the reins on part of the business, this gets real challenging really quick.
Tell us the process.
Keith: So the process was a lot of misfires. Cause here I have this mentor type guy telling me like, yo, you need to have other people coach. I’m like, nah, man, no one else can coach the way I coach, you know, that type of thing. It’s almost like a preserving of your ego.
And so it was a system, a lot of misfires, a lot of me having to like tell people to leave sometimes just because I would not hire correctly, I’d pick the wrong people.
Number one the biggest problem we had was because we didn’t know how to hire. And so when that shift started was getting exposed to a simple book, the E-Myth. And even though it doesn’t give you the tactics, it gives you the mind shift change or the perspective change.
So you guys doubled your size and then you filled it up again. What happened next?
Keith: Then we started to experience a drop of clientele because we were too darn packed. We were planning to put off moving a little bit, but then it was like, Oh my God, we got to move like, cause we’re going to suffocate our business.
And so then we went from 2,500 square feet to 6,000 square feet.
Tony Robbins was coming to town for the first time or to Atlanta. And it was literally going to be, I think the weekend before the big move week. And I was like, man, I don’t want to spend 50 bucks to go to that. My wife was like, dude, just go. And it really bumped us to the next level.
Josh: You guys are focused on building systems. You built them obviously. Cause you’re scaling up. Tell us about what switched in your head.
Keith: We achieved everything we wanted at the beginning. And so it was a depressive, it was maybe 2018 and I was getting really depressed and lost feeling. So I got my wife sold on the growth idea and cause she’s a real conservative type person, which balances me out.
After evaluating a couple different options for growth, franchising seemed to be the best one because you could only max out one location so much. And then you could always open up a second corporate location, but then you’re doubling your liability.
And what really drew me to the franchise model that I really like is that a franchise or franchisee is going to treat their location, their business, like their own business. And typically they outperform corporate locations. If you paid the franchise fee of $35,000 and then you also put up $150,000 of your own money into it and you’re going to have, this is what’s going to make you some money.
For a lot of business owners I think if you would just even pretend like you were going to franchise your business, you could solve all these problems you have.
Chad: Because my understanding there is you have to take detailing systems to a whole new level. As in walk in the door, turn the key, flip this switch, do these things like everything is built on a very detailed system and a franchise manual.
Keith: The first four coaches I ever had, I brought them on and trained them all together. I told them I’m not going to make you sign a non-compete contract because I know that what we’re doing continues to grow so fast that if you take everything I taught you right now, you’ll be left behind a year anyway.
So that’s obviously with the franchise a little different though, there’s a no compete clause for that, but that’s the mentality I come with. I’m going to tell you everything about the business. And if you are able to model it, you kick ass and you deserve to get it. And if you can’t, you can’t that’s okay. Competition is healthy for everybody. Y
Chad: You are running a business. You are growing a business, you believe in serving the customer and that’s where your heart and passion lies. How are you finding the time and energy to build all of the franchising side? How are you able to balance taking care of the business?
And then also the shift to, I need to spend all these hours building documents and training and manuals and attorneys and all the things that come along with it. What, what helped you realize how you could make that shift and also financially be prepared for that shift?
Keith: Bringing on a franchise marketing partner to help us do the manual, to do some of the heavy lifting of stuff.
Chad: You’ve built something that can succeed without you on systems and foundations, which you can franchise.
Keith: And this is where the mission changes. Right? So our company mission is the positive impact as many people as possible from the discipline of boxing and fitness and to do that in a safe and supportive environment. And that’s kind of the competitive advantage.
And my wife has a big passion. She wants great positive businesses people can be a part of, and I love coaching. So how can I blend all of it together? Well, franchisees need to be coached. That’s part of the deal, man. When you buy a franchise from a great franchiser, they’re going to coach you along the way and your success is their success.
And so I love that model. I love it. And the key though, is that a business doesn’t stay complacent, whether it’s a franchise business or not. And that’s something that I want to always make sure of that we do as a company.
So for instance, if you try to run an ad right now on Facebook and you don’t select the right type of form for it, you will get no leads.
Chad:And I want to point out one thing here because I feel like a lot of our young entrepreneurs and a lot of our startup businesses now think there is some magic place they’re missing or they’re looking for that viral video. These things are making a huge difference in your business and drawing leads, but it’s one of 10 pieces of the puzzle that you have to perform day in and day out.
Keith: And to back up your point. When you opt into one of our funnels, guess how fast you get contacted. Automatic, less than 60 seconds. That’s the goal. MIT did a study. They found the conversion rates from online ads of any type social media dropped by over 50% of just the person answering the darn phone or responding back to you if you didn’t get back to them within five minutes. They’re onto the next thing.
There’s this quote, I don’t want to say who it’s by, but it’s a beautiful quote that changed my life when I heard it. And that was that, “The worst employee is a good employee. Because they’re not great and they’re not so bad that you’re gonna fire them. So they’re not going to bring you to the next level, but they’re just good enough.”
One broad concept that really helped me stay focused was just this general beautiful phrase that I first was exposed to by Earl Nightingale from a book. I haven’t read the book, but it’s by Russell Conwell, Acres of Diamonds.
So this guy’s going off in the world trying to find this mysterious field of diamonds. And he goes his whole life looking for this thing and he never finds it. Then whoever bought his old farm discovered diamonds right in the back yard. Acres of diamonds.
And so that’s that concept is what brought me to boxing because it was something in my own backyard with my father that was right there. I had a professional boxing coach that I grew up with. Let me use that. So I used that and learned how I could grow from that. And then okay, is our business truly maximized?
As we have been building this franchise, there is no way that we are hurting our sole location because as the systems get perfected that only benefits us, the business gets better. And then think about this as we open up franchisee’s locations, maybe they will test out some different things. Maybe they’ll discover some more things that are better. And Keppner Inc. will pick that up and do that here.
And what is beautiful though about franchising is when you do the franchise fee correctly. It’s not exorbitant, you do the percentage of revenue within reasonable amounts of the market. It’s about 6%, it’s a long game. And so I love that because it creates discipline within me. It makes it so that I have to ensure longterm success.
That’s what drew me to it is almost all the regulations on all the things that are required in it. You can’t just bait and switch people. And I love that because I am very value oriented and sincere, but I need somebody like my wife to keep me locked in a little bit.
